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bearwriting · 11 months

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Mended

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Summary: Bruised and bloodied, you end up with the last person you'd thought you'd turn to, and you’ve got a delivery to make.

Word Count: 1.7k

Warnings: stitches, brief mentions of torture

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Blinking awake, you were acutely aware of the searing pain that felt like a blanket over your body. As your eyes adjusted to the light, you realized you had no idea where you were or how you had gotten there. You remembered the frost giants and you remembered managing to escape, but you didn’t remember this shithole motel and why was Mad fucking Sweeney asleep on the floor next to the bed?

He stitched me up, you remembered. You’d shown up at his door, half dead, and Sweeney had sewn your ruined flesh back together, but you couldn’t remember how you’d found him. Lucky guess? He usually holed up in dingy places like this. It must have been some weird combination of fate and luck that you ended up where he was.

Sliding out of bed as gingerly as possible, you moved to step around the sleeping leprechaun but found yourself gripping the nightstand in an effort to stay standing as a wave of dizziness passed over you. When you finally managed to haul yourself to the bathroom, you looked at yourself in the mirror and winced. Unsurprisingly, you looked…well, to say you looked like shit would be putting it nicely. A bruise had bloomed across your cheekbone in garish hues of purple and black, already turning a sickly yellow-green at the edges. Your lower lip had been split clean down the middle and, looking at the stitched wound across your face, you were surprised you still had two eyes.

You gently prodded the dental floss stitches, regretting it instantly as pain shot through your head. To his credit, Sweeney’s stitches were much neater than you’d expected. There would still be a scar, that was for sure and certain, but you supposed it wouldn’t be as awful as it might have been.

Probing your ribs, you winced. Once again, it seemed that luck had been on your side in that none of them felt broken, but they were most definitely bruised as all hell.

You knew you needed to assess the extensive damage to your back. You knew you did. If anything, just to get an idea of how long it would take to heal, but the idea of being faced with exactly how badly the Jötnar had rocked your shit made you want to curl into yourself. It was one thing to see the bruises and the stitches on your face, that you could deal with. Hell, the scar would honestly look kind of cool, you figured. But your stomach churned imagining what the skin of your back might look like. It wouldn’t look cool, it wouldn’t look badass. All it would do would be to serve as a reminder that you just weren’t fast enough. You weren’t good enough and you’d let them catch up to you. Fuck.

Bracing yourself, you carefully, slowly attempted to angle yourself so you could see your back in the mirror and inched your shirt up. Nausea rolled through you, an awful oily feeling at the back of your throat at the sight of the shredded skin. These stitches were tighter and cleaner than the ones on your face, and a lump formed in your throat as you remembered how careful and gentle the Irishman had been as he’d worked. You remembered the feel of his calloused hands on your face and your eyes burned with tears.

You released the hem of your shirt and let your head fall forward. With the way the stitches were catching on the fabric, you knew you’d need a bandage. Honestly, you should’ve had one anyway and you needed one for your face too. The last thing you needed was an infection, but there was no way in hell you could clean and bandage it yourself. Your face, sure, but your back? You weren’t even going to bother trying.

You padded back into the room and kicked the ginger giant’s leg. He snuffled in his sleep and rolled away from you. You huffed in annoyance and aimed another kick at his ass, this one with a little more force behind it.

One green eye cracked open and he peered up at you blearily. He was annoyed that his first reaction to seeing you out of bed and standing was to check you for torn stitches and just generally fuss over you to make sure you were okay.

“If the next words out of yer mouth are to tell me how shite my stitches are, I will pull them out and make you do it yourself,” he grumbled, sitting up and scrubbing his hands over his face.

You refused to rise to his bait. “I need you to bandage the stitches on my back. I can’t reach them and they keep catching on my shirt.”

“A please would be nice,” he muttered, but still he rose to his feet and followed you into the bathroom.

You only scowled at him as you tried to lift your shirt enough so that he would have space to work, but your back screamed in protest and your stitches pulled. A hiss escaped through your teeth as you tried not to make a sound, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of showing weakness. Before you could say anything, he had hitched your shirt up himself and was applying antiseptic and gauze, his enormous calloused hands once again displaying the impossible gentleness they had shown the night before.

The silence in the bathroom as he worked was tense and smothering, but stubbornness dictated that you absolutely could not be the one to speak first.

Eventually, he broke the silence.

“Gave me a right scare, showing up at my door like that,” he said quietly as he taped down the gauze on your back and turned his attention to the stitches on your face. “How’d you even know I was here?”

You made a noncommittal noise. “Maybe your luck’s rubbing off on me.”

His eyes met yours. “Maybe.”

The intensity of his gaze began to make you itch and you looked down at the counter and began to toy with a roll of gauze.

“What did this to you, anyway?” he asked.

“None of your business.”

His hands stilled. “You made it my business when you came to me for help. Whatever did this could show up at my door.”

You glared at him in the mirror. “I stole something for the old man.”

He looked at you expectantly.

“I stole something for the old man, and it turns out that frost giants don’t love it when people take their shit, even was the old man’s to begin with.”

He blinked. “He sent you in there alone?”

You snorted. “Like he hasn’t done it before.”

Sweeney’s lip curled. The idea of Grimnir putting you in a position where this could happen to you made him more upset than he thought it would. “What’d you take?” he asked.

“Now that’s really none of your business.”

He rolled his eyes. “So they caught up with you but didn’t get what they were looking for?”

You shook your head. “I hid it until I could shake them and circle back for it. Worked out real well for me.”

“How long did they have you?”

You shrugged. “A couple days? Maybe a week.”

He stared at you incredulously. “And the old man didn’t send anyone to look for you?”

“Why do you care?” you snapped.

“Because if I go missing, I wanna know if anyone’s coming for me or not.” Now he looked away from you, suddenly very interested in the tiled floor. “Besides, you’re my friend. I don’t want you to turn up dead.”

That took you off guard and now it was your turn to stare incredulously. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t make me say it again.”

“Since when are we friends?” you demanded.

He looked at you like he wanted to hit you. “Dunno, maybe when you showed up covered in blood and half dead because you quote, ‘didn’t have anywhere else to go.’ Besides, at some point, I figured it would be easier to be friends if the old man was gonna keep pairin’ us up.”

At this, you laughed in his face. “Was that before or after you abandoned me in Tennessee? Or the time you literally almost let me get flattened by a steamroller? Or—“

“Enough!” he snapped. “You made yer point. I don’t know when it happened and trust me, I'm no happier about it than you are, but you…you’re my best friend.”

You pointed at him. “I’m your only friend. That’s not the same thing.”

He scowled. "It’s enough for you to ask me to save your life, apparently.”

“After everything, it’s the least you could do,” you said. “If I had anyone else, I would’ve saved you the trouble.”

Hurt flashed across his face before it was replaced with another scowl. “Fine. Next time I’ll just let you bleed out.”

“Good,” you snapped, “glad we got that sorted.” You shoved past him out of the bathroom but stumbled as a wave of dizziness almost drove you to your knees. On instinct, you grabbed for Sweeney, and his arms were already encircling you, keeping you upright.

“See,” you said weakly, “you can’t even let me fall and I'm supposed to believe you’d let me bleed out?”

“Shut up,” he muttered as he hauled your arm around his shoulders and half-carried you back to the bed.

Once you felt steadier on your feet, you snatched your arm back. “Look, thank you for fixing me up, but I have a delivery to make.”

He made a disbelieving sound. “You’re not serious.”

You raised an eyebrow and you had never seen a man look so exasperated.

“The Jötnar are after you and you can barely stand!” he argued.

“And I have an obscene amount of cash waiting for me once I get the old man his trinket,” you countered.

Sweeney looked at you, your jaw set and a mean glint in your eyes, and knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere trying to argue with you.

“I’m coming with you,” he said eventually.

You scoffed. “Like hell.”

He glared at you. “I'm s’posed ta meet the old man at Jack’s anyway. And like I said, you can barely stand by yourself. No way you make it there alone.”

You opened your mouth to protest, but he had already hauled your duffel over his shoulder and was halfway out the door. When he realized you weren’t behind him, he turned back to face you.

“Well? I don’t have all day,” he drawled.

You gave him the dirtiest look you could manage, but he hadn’t left you much choice.

tagged: @imaginethatneathuhpartdos @sparklypandemonium

#hope y'all don't mind that i tagged u i tried to get the people who asked abt a part 2 lol #if you did and ur not on here lmk!#mady sweeney #american gods #mad sweeney imagine #mad sweeney x reader #mad sweeney reader insert #american gods imagine #american gods x reader #american gods reader insert #bear writes

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